coldhearted scientist وداد

Raúl Zibechi writes from Montevideo on a conversation with Immanuel Wallerstein:

The United States moved from imposing “95%” of its will upon the world between 1945 and 1970 to a situation of impotence that manifested itself in the arrival to power of the neoconservatives of George W. Bush in 2001. This was a demonstration of weakness and not, as is usually believed to be the case, a show of strength. For the neoconservatives only a display of military strength can reverse the decline of a power that is no longer feared and, consequently, they will encounter ever-growing challenges.

According to Wallerstein, the causes of this decline are to be found in three challenges that converged between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s: the economic competition between Japan and Europe, the decolonization of the third world and its subsequent rejection of the bi-polar U.S.-USSR order, and the emergence of a new generation of anti-systemic movements. These three challenges were successful and eroded the hegemony of the superpower that had imposed the Washington consensus, the neoliberal system, and the globalization model as a means of regaining lost power.

Nevertheless, the “global revolution of 1968” or in other words the challenge posed by the new movements is, for Wallerstein, a decisive fact that is not only at the heart of the hegemonic crisis of the empire but also survival itself of capitalism as a global system. In a revealing text, “1968: The Great Experiment,”1 he maintains that 1968’s events were more important even than the French and Russian revolutions and because of its significance was the only revolution in the world equal to that of 1848. He assures us that although both failed, they changed the world because they were unplanned; rather they were “spontaneous in the truest sense of the word.”

The “revolution of 1968” undermined the capacity of the North to watch over and intervene in the South, produced changes “in the power relations between status groups (age groups, gender groups, and ‘ethnic’ minorities)” that although they occurred “in the hidden spaces of daily life” are lasting and suppose permanent subordination; and civil society and salaried workers showed themselves to be less disposed than before to both passively accept domination and take orders.

Read the whole article and interview.

Axé.